A woman in California was not pleased when she prepared a salad for dinner and saw a small, speckled frog nestled between the spinach leaves. Sure, people sometimes pay good money to have frog legs for dinner, but those frogs are usually, you know, purpose-raised. And cooked.

The factories that process salad greens put a lot of effort into ensuring that a minimum number of frogs end up in our salad bowls. The woman who found this frog (warning: giant dead frog picture at top of article) purchased the affected bag of salad at Sam’s Club, and the spinach came from Taylor Farms. (If that name sounds familiar, it was bags of Taylor Farms lettuce that PBS and NPR found piled up in a landfill in a recent story on food waste.)

“I’m just really disgusted. I don’t think I can ever eat a salad again,” the woman told a local newspaper. “How could they miss a dead frog?”

Someone at Taylor Farms explained in some detail how a frog could have ended up in the container of spinach: the company uses vibration tables and laser sorters to remove insects, animals, and any other debris that might have been harvested along with the greens.

It’s possible, they explained, that the little frog had been concealed behind a leaf when this batch was sorted, or and the laser was not working properly when this batch was processed. The company didn’t respond when a reporter from the San Gabriel Valley Tribune asked whether there have been other reports of frogs in other containers of spinach.

While the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t get involved unless there’s a widespread frogs-in-food trend, you should still consider giving the agency a call: it’s through reports from consumers that they’re able to spot trends.

Dead frog found in packaged spinach, Covina woman says [San Gabriel Valley Tribune]

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